THE '64 CIVIL RIGHTS MURDERS

THE '64 CIVIL RIGHTS MURDERS; THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

By Jesse Kornbluth; Jesse Kornbluth, who lives in New York City, is a contributing edi tor of Vanity Fair magazine and a screenwriter.

Published: July 23, 1989

MICKEY SCHWER-ner and his wife, Rita,had been teaching blacks to read and register to vote for three months in Meridian, Miss., when a dozen crosses were burned in the next county. The Schwerners knew what those crosses signified - and that, contrary to the sheriff's explanation, no ''outsiders'' were involved. Still, on Memorial Day 1964, Mickey Schwerner drove the 35 miles from Meridian into Neshoba County. ''You have been slaves too long,'' he told an all-black audience at Mount Zion Methodist Church in Philadelphia. ''We can help you help yourselves. . . .

Meet us here, and we'll train you so you can qualify to vote.''

Despite the perils of aligning themselves with a bearded New York City Jew - this was a county with a handful of registered black voters and a sheriff who had already killed two black men ''in the line of duty'' - the parishioners of Mount Zion voted to let Schwerner and James Chaney, a black, 21-year-old plasterer from Meridian, establish a base at their church.

Three weeks later, Mount Zion was no more. Members of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan pistol-whipped an aging parishioner, assaulted several others and then torched the building, the first of more than 20 churches that would be burned in Mississippi that summer. But their real target - 24-year-old Mickey Schwerner - had eluded them.

On June 21, Schwerner and Chaney returned to Philadelphia to interview the victims. This time, they brought along Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old college student from New York who had just arrived in Mississippi for what civil rights leaders were calling Freedom Summer. That afternoon, Cecil Price, a Philadelphia deputy sheriff, arrested Chaney on a speeding charge, and his white associates as suspects in the church burning.

According to accounts some of the participants gave to the Federal Bureau of Investigation - testimony that later figured in a Federal trial and has recently been recounted by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray in their book ''We Are Not Afraid'' - the civil rights workers were released from jail late that night, chased by two carloads of armed Klansmen, intercepted again by Price and handed over to the Klan for disposal in the piney woods.

''Are you that nigger lover?'' Wayne Roberts, one of the Klansmen, is said to have demanded. ''Sir, I know just how you feel,'' Schwerner replied. With that, Roberts shot him in the heart. Next, Roberts shot Goodman. ''Save one for me!'' shouted Klansman James Jordan, running over to Chaney and shooting him in the abdomen as Roberts fired into Chaney's back. Then, for good measure, Roberts put a final bullet into Chaney's brain. ''You didn't leave me nothing but a nigger,'' Jordan said, ''but at least I killed me a nigger.'' The Klansmen then bulldozed the three bodies into an earthen dam under 10 tons of dirt and went home, certain that proof of their crime would never be found. But they miscalculated. These civil rights workers were not like others who had been killed in the same cause - two of them were white. And because this is, as Schwerner's widow, Rita, has observed, ''a society that values some lives more highly than others,'' Washington politicians and New York journalists suddenly cared a great deal about the missing civil rights workers. The entire nation watched as F.B.I. agents fished a charred station wagon from a swamp, and, acting on a tip, found the three bodies 44 days after the men had disappeared. National attention made instant martyrs of the three young men. It also made Philadelphia close ranks, denying not only involvement in the crime but knowledge of the atmosphere that spawned it. As the administrator of the local hospital told a New York Times reporter, Joseph Lelyveld, that year, ''The people of Mississippi love niggers.''

IF SOME MISSISSIPPIANS have had an odd way of expressing their affection for their fellow citizens, it is partly because they have followed the lead of their politicians. Some of these politicians have been Klan members or sympathizers; others have simply been demagogues. Even in the 1960's, Gov. Paul B. Johnson Jr. included a line in his speeches that defined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as ''Niggers, Alligators, Apes, Coons and Possums.''

For a state that branded itself as the most unreconstructed in the nation, Mississippi has undergone a major upheaval in recent years. In 1964, 5,000 blacks could vote; now 600,000 are registered, and they use their ballots. When Ray Mabus, who grew up 45 miles from Philadelphia, ran for Governor in 1987 on a platform of ''basic, drastic change,'' whites were 2 to 1 against him - he won the election by carrying the black vote 9 to 1. These days, much is made of the fact that Mississippi has 600 black elected officials, more than any other state. In this climate, the new Governor even welcomed the filming of ''Mississippi Burning,'' which was loosely based on the civil rights murders. ''Mississippi is now the South's most progressive environment,'' Governor Mabus told me. ''Because of our history, we went through a crucible others didn't. And that has enabled us to move on in ways that others haven't.''